What PaaS providers / platforms do you like? I want to move some personal shell scripted boxes to PaaS, but dropped the idea with the decline of Heroku. Tried Dokku and struggled, but it seems like I should give it another try.

Maybe try coolify[0] its provides a better than dokku in my personal experience.

0. https://coolify.io/

I need ARM, is this still the right choice? Nothing is coming up when I hit the site.

Anything of note between the two which you found favorable? I am early-days into designing a Dokku backed system. Dokku has a lot going for it that makes it appealing to me, but happy to learn what I am missing.

The only problem with this is I don’t want something running on my own server that I barely understand. I’d rather use say fly.io that way if there is a problem I can get support from them.

I’m in a weird position where I work with both extremely large enterprises and very small startups and not much in between. The enterprises in my area lean towards Azure so it’s still my cloud provider of choice. I haven’t had occasion to look for PaaS providers outside of the major cloud vendors yet. On the startup side, most of these companies want to be cloud first so it’s much easier to start them the right way and avoid the legacy mess that most enterprises deal with today.

Maintainer of Dokku here:

I'd love if you jumped into our Discord/Slack and brought up some of the issues you were seeing so we can at least make the experience better for others using Dokku. Feel free to hit me up there (my nick is `savant`).

Thank you for the kind words and I'll check out your Discord when I next take a pass at it.

Let me preface and say that I'm an application dev with only a working knowledge of Docker. I'm not super skilled at infra and the application I struggled with has peculiar deployment parameters: It's a Python app that at build-time parses several gigs of static HTML crawls to populate a Postgres database that's static after being built. A Flask web app then serves against that database. The HTML parsing evolves fast and so the populated DB data should be bundled as part of the application image(s).

IIRC, I struggled with structuring Dockerfiles when the DB wasn't persistent but instead just another transient part of the app, but it seemed surmountable. The bigger issue seemed to be how to avoid pulling gigs of rarely changed data from S3 for each build when ideally it'd be cached, especially in a way that behaved sanely across DigitalOcean and my local environment. I presume the right Docker image layer caching would address the issue, but I pretty rapidly reached the end of my knowledge and patience.

Dokku's DX does seem great for people doing normal things. :)

Do you generally move to managed k8s or away from k8s entirely? How is the costing change?